The future of AI - what's the "realistic" view? https://mentalcontractions.substack.com/p/the-future-of-ai-whats-the-realistic
ChatGPT got to one hundred million users in the blink of an eye. Fastest product adoption rate recorded, ever. Let that sink in. Faster than shiny apps like Instagram or TikTok.
So err on the side of caution and assume "AI is improving and spreading very quickly". Anything else is just irresponsible.
I really don't appreciate naysayers who think they're cute pointing out what LLMs get wrong, if the context is: "We're nowhere near AGI yet".. yeah, sure. 10 years ago we were not going to see Go human players being defeated in our lifetime, nor were we going to get anything close to the sort of natural language processing GPT-3+ displays.
Researchers Discover a More Flexible Approach to Machine Learning: “Liquid” neural nets, based on a worm’s nervous system, can transform their underlying algorithms on the fly, giving them unprecedented speed and adaptability. https://www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-discover-a-more-flexible-approach-to-machine-learning-20230207/
"Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameters", Deghani et al 2023 (Demonstrates and observes improving performance, fairness, robustness, and alignment with scale.) https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.05442
Is it a coincidence that GPT-3 requires roughly the same amount of compute as is necessary to emulate the human brain? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TAbQHFwGD4E3jCMnt/is-it-a-coincidence-that-gpt-3-requires-roughly-the-same
Tom Scott video on a rogue AGI scenario https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ
Trends in the dollar training cost of machine learning systems https://epochai.org/blog/trends-in-the-dollar-training-cost-of-machine-learning-systems
The founder of social Q&A site Quora is experimenting with Poe, an app that answers questions using AI. What role is left for people? [Wired] https://archive.is/g6oo6
Lectures on Theoretical Physics http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/teaching.html
Ohm's Law: History and Biography https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk_BpXlfZ8U
What fact that you know is true but most people aren't ready to accept it? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/twdjDGDZtyHqZvLiH/what-fact-that-you-know-is-true-but-most-people-aren-t-ready
“Nanotechnology sometimes sounds as much like science fiction as artificial intelligence once did. But the problems holding it back seem solvable, and some of the answers may lie inside our own bodies.” https://worksinprogress.co/issue/nanotechnologys-spring
Researchers create an optical tractor beam that pulls macroscopic objects https://phys.org/news/2023-01-optical-tractor-macroscopic.html
“…the archetypal pattern of online communities is one of gradual decay. People are more likely to join communities where users are more skilled than they are. As communities grow, the skill of the median user goes down. The capacity to filter for quality deteriorates. Simpler, more memetic content drives out more complex thinking.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fu7bqAyCMjfcMzBah/eigenkarma-trust-at-scale
That the UFOs being shot down now are of alien origin is of course astronomically unlikely. But there is one scenario under which our ability to shoot them down is at least consistent with their ability to reach Earth. They could have evolved within our own solar system. More specifically, the aliens could have evolved in one of the subsurface oceans of Enceladus or Europa.
Like many species on Earth, their offspring would probably have been threatened by predators feeding on their helpless young. In response to this threat, they may have evolved the ability to build elaborate structures within the icy crust of their ocean as a defense mechanism. These waterless spaces could have allowed them to make critical discoveries such as that of fire and metallurgy. Equipped with the urge to drill deeper into the ice to better protect their young, they eventually discovered the cosmos.
If these aliens are close to our level of technology, they could be exploring Earth with flying objects, just like we are exploring Mars with a tiny helicopter right now. It would be quite easy to shoot down that helicopter, even with World War 1 technology.
(Note that I'm saying that this is astronomically unlikely. I'm just pointing out that there exists a logically consistent scenario.)
See also: The last vital ingredient for life has been discovered on Enceladus https://www.sciencenews.org/article/enceladus-phosphorus-life-building-block-saturn-moon
David Tong is a great physics educator. He has a great talk on the role of fields in physics on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVQfWC_evg&